4 - Economy and its Inoperativity

Summary

THE BIPOLAR SOVEREIGNTY OF IDENTITY

Christianity's implicit indebtedness to acts of exclusionary inclusion – the basis for establishing such figures as the homo sacer – has resulted in the perpetual re-articulation and justification of God’s, humanity's and the Church's employment of sovereign power in very real and worldly political terms. These political terms, and the divisions they rest upon, are not exclusively the domain of the Church, but the foundations of order itself as we know it. The question that lingers, and will presumably linger throughout any analysis of Agamben's work in general, is: to what degree such a messianic suspension of governing institutional norms could ever become a history in and of itself? Or, in a much more Derridean sense: will the weak force of the messianic be that which haunts every institution or normative structure without ever positing a (grand narratival) history for itself, as to declare such a force for the majority is to dominate over another and to cease the radically deconstructive act that is the force of the messianic?

Though I will ultimately argue that we cannot do away with narrative, identities and communities altogether, we are still able to discern the difficulty of attempting to resolve this question through some of the political-theological examples that Agamben takes up. Furthermore, these examples hinge upon historical-theological efforts to avoid the problem altogether by positing the sovereignty of God as the ultimate solution (or ultimate denial of a political reality, depending on one's perspective). Such an investigation, from Agamben's point of view, includes a critique of the attempted transfer of the sheer power and domination that glory attempts to mask and maintain into the sphere of the aesthetic through the concept of the beautiful, what he senses at work in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth alike (KG 212–13/OHS 564–5).

To give a glimpse of this connection between glory and beauty as evident and lingering justifications for sovereign power, whether vested in God or in humanity, we might look to von Balthasar's theological aesthetics as it is taken up in his The Glory of the Lord – a movement that is made parallel to Barth's attempts to ground God's sovereignty in his distance from any worldly affairs. Consequently, this distancing offers a permanent critique of all political and religious forms.